61–70 of 238 posts
This is all due to Microsoft contractors (who were treated like regular employees in the 80s and 90s) winning a lawsuit that retroactively forced Microsoft to give them a ton of stock. Companies now have to be rude to contractors to avoid a similar lawsuit. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The law forces google to choose contractors instead of hiring employees?
Contractors are easy, you just throw money at a contracting firm and they solve your problem. Doing it inhouse means they have to hire managers and all other support personnel needed to hire and keep employees, that is a lot more complicated. The law makes it more complicated to throw money at contracting firms to make them solve your problems, hence why they get fired every 2 years etc.
This is Google cheaping out on medical insurance and PTO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The right thing for the company to do would be to hire people as employees, but it appears that worker protections are too strong for them to want to financially. Universal healthcare/dental/paid leave would allow for companies who’s employees currently are the only receivers of these “benefits” to not require companies to hold onto people so long. Worker protections are supposed to be so that catastrophic job loss i…
Some people, like the grandparent or me, don't want to be employees.
If you're contracting out your services to only one company, and they have primary say over when and how you work[1], then that's not a genuine "contractor" relationship; you're an employee that they're taking advantage of by paying less and not providing benefits to.
If you really do want to be a contractor, who sells their services to many companies, sets their own hours, and has primary control over their tasks and such, then by all means do so. But please don't try to make things worse for the vast majority who do not want these things by advocating for stripping away protections from people who are being abusively and illegally misclassified as contractors.
[1] I don't recall offhand all the various specific aspects of a job that define whether you're logically a contractor or an employee, but I do remember that it's basically "if your livelihood depends entirely on one company paying you, and/or they have near-total control over how you do your work, you're an employee, whatever the paperwork says".
>Contractors love the good pay and engaging work in Google's data centers. They resent that Google and its staffing firm, Modis Engineering, make them quit every two years. >[...] But those two-year contracts are written in stone. Workers like Wait are not usually allowed to apply either to renew their contracts or to do the same job as a Google employee. If they want to keep working in the same job, they have to lea…
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"Impractical" and "not throwing away money" are really interesting choices of words when discussing why one of the world's richest companies gives PTO or health insurance.
I think it's a lot less interesting than people want to pretend it is. A company's willingness to throw away money should be largely invariant to its overall financial health.
"BigCorp will avoid as much labor costs as possible. To improve labor conditions and compensation, regulation must require it."
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Unfortunately there just isn't enough of an intensive to pay more for the same labor. If contractors stop making them self available for the work, they may have butter luck becoming employees.
Don't they end up paying more though? Modis must be making a profit on the workers so Google could, in theory, hire them directly and save money.
I mean janitors, cafeteria and cleaners used to be in-house. Maybe managers are afraid of being demoted to manage the cafeteria?
This is all due to Microsoft contractors (who were treated like regular employees in the 80s and 90s) winning a lawsuit that retroactively forced Microsoft to give them a ton of stock. Companies now have to be rude to contractors to avoid a similar lawsuit. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-...
Or they could hire them as employees. This is not temporary work, they only use agencies to save money and circumvent workers protections. I get that there are freelancers who like not being employees but that's not the case here. I bet most Temps at Google would love getting employee status and there's no reason most of them shouldn't. It's not like Google couldn't afford the extra payroll.
This is a version of a minimum wage, and runs into the same tradeoffs between economic growth and social fairness.
This is all due to Microsoft contractors (who were treated like regular employees in the 80s and 90s) winning a lawsuit that retroactively forced Microsoft to give them a ton of stock. Companies now have to be rude to contractors to avoid a similar lawsuit. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-...
> This is all due to Microsoft contractors (who were treated like regular employees in the 80s and 90s) winning a lawsuit that retroactively forced Microsoft to give them a ton of stock. This is all due to Microsoft who used contractors like regular employees in the 80s and 90s but did not compensate them like regular employees. It's not the workers fault.
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Why do you have to give them a huge boost in comp? There's no union at Google, they can pay whatever they see fit. They could just hire them at lower salaries but that'd destroy the image that anyone working at a FAANG makes at least $250k/yr.
Yes, that would just compound the grief. Endless media articles on how certain employees are considered second class citizens at Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The right thing for the company to do would be to hire people as employees, but it appears that worker protections are too strong for them to want to financially. Universal healthcare/dental/paid leave would allow for companies who’s employees currently are the only receivers of these “benefits” to not require companies to hold onto people so long. Worker protections are supposed to be so that catastrophic job loss i…
Employee-status may come with certain benefits, but it also comes with many drawbacks and burdens for the employee. For me, and probably many on this board, the biggest risk is "works-for-hire". Under US law, contractors have strong legal protections of their own intellectual protection. Whereas it's much easier for a W-2 employer to claim IP made in personal time. I don't really care about healthcare of unemployment…
It's the government screwing _some_ people over for the good of everyone else, where it's presumed that "good of everyone else" is worth more to society than what is lost by those that get screwed over by it.
At least, that's generally the intent.